Too much fighting in our RPGs?

A couple of posts back, I reviewed Michael Shea’s The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

I haven’t quite finished with it.

At the back, in the appendices, Shea lists the questions he asked DMs during his research for the book. One of the questions was:

“D&D players, of the three pillars of D&D game play, which do you enjoy the most?”

• 59% NPC interaction and roleplaying
• 27% Exploration and investigation
• 14% Combat

I was surprised by the result. 14%, or about 1 in 7 players, prefer other things to combat when playing D&D.

Given how much focus combat is given in D&D, I thought the figure would be higher. One reason I don’t play D&D (or other fantasy games) is that I find them very violent.

That’s not to say I’m a pacifist, but I have two big issues with combat in RPGs.

1. Combat is often slow and dull. And full of fiddly rules edge-cases that I can never remember. And it turns into a boardgame when the miniatures come out.
2. In a lot of fantasy RPGs, combat is consequence-free. I prefer settings where getting into a fight has proper consequences rather than just losing hit points. (When I run Call of Cthulhu, don’t run around with shotguns unless you want to see the business end of a police armed response squad.)

(@vodkashok ruminates more on this in his recent blog post.)

So maybe more gamers are like me than I realise.

Of course, I’m delighted that “NPC interaction and roleplaying” gets such a high score. (Although aren’t those two different things?)

But two things intrigue me.

1. Does this hold true generally? This was a small, self-selected sample and so wasn’t very representative.
2. If it is true, does that mean we have too much fighting in our games? Would we be better suited with fewer combats and more interaction/roleplaying? And if so, what’s the best way of doing that (I’ve already said that I like to see players banter amongst themselves as characters.)

The Roswell Incident

So last Friday, thirteen brave souls gathered to play The Roswell Incident, the first in a series of freeform larps exploring first contact with aliens. 

I wrote episode 2 first (which I will talk about once I’ve run that). But once I had episode 2 done (or nearly done), I started work on episode 1, which I had decided would be set in 1948 Roswell, at the time of the famous UFO crash.

My early thoughts on Roswell was to set it at the airbase (which was then known as Roswell Army Air Field) concerning the fate of the UFO and dead alien. But as I sketched that out, it became clearer that I needed to change the game’s focus and bring more characters in. So I changed it to a few days before—a rancher finds strange debris which brings the army, FBI and others to Roswell.

Our wonderful mayor

(Click here for more detail on The Roswell Incident, including the cast list.)

Discord or face-to-face?

It’s always much easier to play (and run) a freeform larp face-to-face, providing you have 13 willing volunteers in the same space. If that’s hard to do, then playing online is a great alternative. But playing online has technical challenges.

Luckily, the talented Rei and Roger have developed the wonderful LARPPorterBot, which manages locations and items. I’d used this a year ago when I ran The Highgate Club, but it’s been improved since then. So I needed a crash course to get it running again.

I felt a childish delight in getting the bot running properly—and happily it worked well, with only a couple of glitches on the night.

Calls for sign-ups, casting and reserves

So how long between announcing your online larp and running it? I figure about three weeks.

• Day 1: Announce The Roswell Incident on the UK-Freeforms and Remote, Digital Larps, and Live Action Online Games groups on Facebook. I provided a link to the game site and the sign-up form. I should also have announced it on the ukfreeforms mailing list for those who aren’t on Facebook, but I actually did it on day 4.
• Days 2-6: Continue to engage with replies on Facebook and the mailing list to make sure plenty of people see it.
• Day 7: Issue the casting form to those who have registered an interest. As I was slightly oversubscribed, I asked for volunteers for the reserve list. 
• Day 13: Cast the game.
• Day 14: Send out character sheets, the game background, a “how to play on Discord” sheet. Oh, and a link to Discord. (I should have requested everyone to confirm receipt—I didn’t do that, which meant I spend the next few days worried that people had not got their characters.)
• Days 15-20: Wait nervously for people to turn up on the Discord server.
• Day 21: First thing, send out another link to the Discord server. This is both because the previous link will have expired and remind everyone that the game is today. (I had a couple of players get the day wrong last year for The Highgate Club, so I was ultra-careful this time.)

Eunice and the power cut

The British Isles was battered by a couple of storms in the run up to The Roswell Incident. I had assumed that if there was a problem, I could use my laptop battery and mobile data. However...

About three hours before the game was due to start, we lost all power thanks to Storm Eunice. And while I had battery power on my laptop, I had no mobile data. At all.

We ate tea by candlelight (which was great fun, but I was anxious).

Then, about 40 minutes before curtain up, the power came back on—and I hopped straight onto Discord and set things up. 

We were lucky—the other end of the village didn’t get power until 3 am the following morning.

Running an online larp

Running an online larp is strange. If I’ve done my job right, then all the players have everything they need—they only need to come to me when there’s a problem. 

Discord

So when I started the game, the players headed off to their starting locations and started playing. That left me to . . . do what exactly? So I sat at the GM’s desk for a few minutes, then headed into one of the channels to find out what the players were talking about.

Eventually, I noticed a couple of players in a channel I had to manage (because there were things to find). So I went there and did that.

But I wasn’t sure when to end the game.

When I’d finished writing, I guessed it would take 90-120 minutes to play. But I didn’t know—and I couldn’t tell how quickly people were powering through things.

At about 90 minutes, things still seemed to be going strong, so I told everyone that we would end in 30 minutes. I noted that some players were finishing, but I was also pleased that other players brought them back into the game.

After two hours, I called it a wrap. One group of players, who had figured that something was going on, ended the game with the line, “And we don’t know what their motives are!” Which made for a lovely cliffhanger.

Post-game feedback

I’ve asked for feedback for episode 2. Some characters will return, but I am waiting for the feedback to decide precisely who.

The vet, mayor and sheriff try to figure out what's going on

I also have a few corrections to make to the character sheets—things that came up during play that I hadn’t explained clearly. There were only a couple of those, which was satisfying considering this was its first run.

What’s next?

So what’s next?

Well, a few things.

Polishing: At some point I’ll put The Roswell Incident on my itch.io page for others to run. But that means polishing it, adding all the explanatory text in my head, and formatting things like contingency envelopes so that they’re easy to run. (I’ll also re-run it before too long.)

Prepping episode 2: I need to review the feedback, finish episode 2, and run it.

Episode 3 and beyond: I have a vague idea where I’m going with the future episodes, but now that we’re underway, I need to nail things down.

Improving the bot: I’ve offered to help improve the Discord bot. Unfortunately, I can’t programme, but I can help with improving the documentation.

So that’s going to keep me busy for the next little while.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master

Some of the best advice for running RPGs can be found in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master (written by Michael Shea).

This is a sequel to The Lazy Dungeon Master, which argues that we do too much preparation as GMs, and the preparation we do is on the wrong things.

Lately I’ve been running published adventures, and I find there’s a lot of prep needed for those as I’m trying to run them as written. Certainly, I found the easiest game to prepare each week was my mini-campaign for The Dee Sanction (I explained what I did in a series of posts, starting here).

And because I play so much online, much of my prep is in getting the online tools ready (which I enjoy).

But I agree wholeheartedly with The Lazy Dungeon Master’s premise that we often prepare too much. 

The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master takes this premise and explains the eight areas where you need to prepare:

1. Review the characters
2. Create a strong start
3. Outline potential scenes
4. Define secrets and clues
5. Develop fantastic locations
6. Outline important NPCs
7. Choose relevant monsters
8. Select magic item rewards

And given this is aimed at fantasy RPGs, and I rarely run those, I can ignore the last two.

And of the remaining six, given the speed I normally run a game, NPCs, clues and locations will usually last several sessions. 

However, having compared this to my run of The Dee Sanction, I think The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master omits the most important step of all: 

1. At the end of each session, ask the players what they want to do next.

They’ll tell you where you need to plan next. There, even less prep—but I probably couldn’t get a book out of it.

(There’s more to The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, including excellent advice on campaigns, NPCs, different styles of combat and more. I haven’t regretted buying it. Here's the website.)

A rant about game jargon

I just need to get this out of my system.

Technical language, or jargon, helps communication—particularly within a specialism.

But I don’t like using jargon to exclude outsiders.

So I am frustrated by some game jargon where the terminology has an everyday meaning different from its use as jargon.

It’s frustrating because it’s opaque, and it doesn’t help make our hobby more inclusive.

So my most hated game jargon:

Bluesheet

This originated in theatre-style larps for general background sheets. A group of characters, say US spies, would have a common background sheet explaining what US spies do and their goals. This saved copying it onto each character sheet, and ensures that everyone gets the game information. And because they were usually printed on blue sheets of paper, they became known as bluesheets.

And although I can’t remember the last time I saw one printed on blue paper, the term bluesheet lingers on. 

What’s wrong with background sheet or info sheet?

Bid (as in to bid a game)

This comes from Intercon, I think, and is now part of the UK’s lexicon for Consequences. To ensure a reasonable quality, all larps must be approved by the convention committee. That’s fine—I approve of that. Except that the process of submitting a game for proposal is called bidding.

Bidding?

That’s not what bidding normally means, but it seems too late to call it what it really is: submitting.

Module

I blame D&D for this. In D&D, when someone says module, they mean adventure or scenario. Module has perfectly good dictionary definitions (these are from the Cambridge Dictionary):

• one of a set of separate parts that, when combined, form a complete whole
• one of the units that together make a complete course, taught especially at a college or university
• a part of a spacecraft that can operate independently of the other parts, especially when separate from them.

None of these explain how an adventure came to be described as a module.

Freeform

So I know exactly what I mean when I say a freeform: a self-contained live-action roleplaying game with pre-generated characters, simulated combat and limited running time. (Typified, I guess, by the murder mystery games we publish at Freeform Games.)

Now I know that’s a rubbish term—at the time (in the 1990s), we (in the UK at least) were differentiating our games from ‘live-action’ larps, which typically meant running around outside with rubber swords.

Anyway, larp terminology changes across the world—we don’t have a common language and now freeform means different things.

What I mean when I say freeform is also known as theatre-style, or chamber larps, or secrets and powers larps. 

But freeform also now has other meanings—American Freeform is something else (although I’m not sure what), and in the Nordic scene, freeform means something else again.

I can take my fair share of the blame for promoting the term in the UK. I set up the uk-freeforms mailing list and UK-Freeforms Facebook Group, and I called my company ‘Freeform Games’. (Although Morgana Cowling’s 1989 The Freeform Book was extremely influential.)

I now call my games freeform larps, which is still a little imprecise, but I don’t have a better name for them. 

ALIEN Destroyer of Worlds

So here (at last) is my review for Destroyer of Worlds for ALIEN. I’ve written before about how I prepared for play (using Trello and including some banter) and changes I made to stat blocks (here and here). So having run it, what did I think?

TL;DR: Destroyer of Worlds is a spectacular but messy scenario. While initially it looks great, when you dive in, you find it’s hard to run, doesn’t make sense and includes so much stuff that you can’t use it all. If you can make it work, Destroyer of Worlds is epic—but I feel Free League need to make their games easier to run. Sometimes, less is more.

Spoilers ahoy!

Elevator pitch

If Chariot of the Gods is Alien, then Destroyer of Worlds is Aliens. Our heroes are PCs seeking other marines (AWOLs) just as enemy forces invade, and the AWOLs have been impregnated with something nasty. Oh, and a whole bunch of xenomorphs (including a queen) are between them and their way off-planet.

Before I get going, there are many things wrong with Destroyer of Worlds’ story. All sorts of things don’t make sense—but you don’t notice them at first. I’m not going to go through the flaws in detail—because these two reviews (here and here) have done that for me.

But Destroyer of Worlds doesn’t need to be logical—what counts is what happens at the table. So yes, Destroyer of Worlds is mad and crazy and doesn’t make much sense. Don’t worry about it. (In the same way I didn’t worry about Bishop remote-piloting the second dropship in Aliens—a moment’s thought and I would have realised that the Sulaco must have a full crew. And probably more marines—otherwise, why have two dropships?) As I’ve said before, all the Alien stories are fanfic.

Physically impressive

Destroyer of Worlds is physically impressive. It comes in a box and consists of a 88-page book, a large map, several handouts, six pre-generated characters, and some cards.

Everything is graphically consistent with the ALIEN line—lots of green on black, whether text or the maps. As ever, the artwork is excellent, and I’d like to see more of it.

But this is where I encountered my first problem—I didn’t find the layout easy to read.

Worse, things are scattered around and hard to find (see my previous post about stat blocks for an example). The maps look atmospheric but aren’t easy to use in play—particularly the multi-level Fort Nebraska. I gave up trying to work out routes from one part of the map to another—but more on that below.

Pretty, but not so easy to use

Destroyer of Worlds hasn’t been laid out so that it’s easy to run. Green on black is lovely, but you can’t easily make notes or add marginalia. Also, many locations are split over two pages—a single, two page spread would be so much easier to deal with as a GM. (For example, the Marshal Station covers 2.5 sides—I’m sure the text and map could be edited down to a two-page spread.)

Plus, there are layout goofs, such as the card showing one of the NPCs that reveals that they are dead. The cards are a lovely idea, but only if the writing and graphic design are joined up.

I would have liked to see the background information about the colony also presented as player-facing material. (I created my own.)

Our heroes

Destroyer of Worlds comes with six pre-generated marines: Captain Silva, Warrant Officer Chaplain (an android), Gunnery Sergeant Mason, Sergeant Iona, PfC Dante, PfC Zmijewski and Private Hammer. They form Charlie Team—and they don’t know each other (making rivals and buddies meaningless). 

I find the provided character sheets barely adequate for play, so I created new sheets which fleshed out their background as, in some cases, bits appeared to be missing. (I did the same for Chariot of the Gods and wrote about that then.) In addition, I let the players choose who their buddies and rivals would be during play, although that didn’t work out in the end.

As I had three players, I asked that one take Captain Silva. Liam took the Captain, Thomas took Gunny Mason and Jon played PfC Dante, which created a small chain of command. The Colonial Marines Operation Manual talks about how there’s no place for rank around the RPG table, but we all know that’s not true: players like roleplaying the chain of command.

During firefights (and there are many), I had each player control two squad members so I could concentrate on the bad guys.

Finally, I should point out how unpleasant PfC Zmijewski is. I gave Zmijewski to Liam when Captain Silva bought it, but Liam found Zmijewski repellent and handed him back. (I wish I’d noticed that earlier—I would have changed Zmijewski.)

Were I doing it again, I would make the group part of an established team, with history and buddies and rivals. Making everyone strangers doesn’t help the scenario.

The scenario

As with all cinematic ALIEN scenarios, Destroyer of Worlds is presented in three acts.

Act 1—the investigation: In Act 1 the PCs are tracking the four missing marines (AWOLs). Along the way they encounter insurgents, marshals, doctors and a friendly bar owner. They also encounter monsters—a chestburster, xenomorph and something new.

Act 2—invasion: Act 2 starts with an invasion by enemy forces. The PCs are ordered to withdraw and return to Fort Nebraska. This is the shortest act—there are no new areas to explore, and it’s just a list of encounters (an execution squad, a tank, UPP androids, and so on).

Act 3—the Fort Nebraska dungeon: Act 3 starts as the PCs near Fort Nebraska and something drops black goo from the skies, creating a viral plague. The PCs need to get into Fort Nebraska, restart the reactor and mainframe, clear out the xenomorph nest, and ascend the space elevator. Phew! All the while avoiding infection, radiation, numerous fires and other hazards. Disappointingly, it feels like a dungeon crawl.

And yes, it’s as exhausting to run as it sounds.

Running Destroyer of Worlds

My regular games are all online these days, and Destroyer of Worlds was no different. I ran it with three players: Jon, Liam and Thomas. I used Discord for video chat and Trello as our virtual tabletop. We played for 2.5 hour sessions (sometimes a little less).

Act 1 took maybe six hours, Act 1 two hours and Act 3 about three and a half hours. So eleven and a half hours in total. (EDIT - originally I wrote ten hours, but reviewing my notes this was a slight underestimate.)

Overall, the players enjoyed Destroyer of Worlds. There perhaps wasn’t as much in-character chatter as I usually see, but the combats were tense (lethal). None of us really enjoy combat in RPGs, and there was too much fighting in Destroyer of Worlds—but I don’t think anyone expected anything different.

• There’s so much in Destroyer of Worlds that I dropped a fair bit:
• As Chaplain was an NPC, I dropped his plot. As it was, Chaplain suffered a severe chassis breach at the end of Act 1, which put him out of action. (With a fourth player, I would have asked that one take Chaplain.)
• I kept the UPP androids in the background. By the time they were due to appear, I was tired of all the combat scenes.
• I toned down the black goo airburst and ignored fire and radiation in the base.
• The PCs didn’t visit the spaceport or the refinery.
• I changed how the PCs moved around the base (see below).

And although I dropped plenty, the players never knew. Destroyer of Worlds isn’t short of action.

Combat: There is a lot of fighting in Destroyer of Worlds. Between the xenomorphs and the invasion forces you will be rolling combat dice a lot. And if the dice fall badly, things can rapidly spiral out of control.

I sped up combat by pre-rolling for NPCs, so I didn’t make to-hit or armour rolls, which made things much easier. (More on this here, when I talk about stat blocks again.)

Although I am not fond of combat, it did create our most memorable scenes. In our final fight of Act 1, Captain Silva froze (panic!) while making her rappelling roll—and moments later, the dropship was hit by two RPGs. Chaplain was hit (he was piloting) and the dropship went into a spin, crashing and killing Silva (skull crushed) and disabling Chaplain (severe chassis breach--legs torn off). All in a matter of moments. 

Act 3 dungeon crawl drudge: I found the Act 3 Fort Nebraska dungeon crawl a real drudge. Infection, fire, radiation, black silt—and all of that before we get to the xenomorphs running around. (I toned down the environmental hazards—I largely ignored the fire and radiation, and I only infected the odd NPC with the black goo.) Plus, the maps aren’t much help—I became fed up of poring over them, trying to work out the best route from A to B.

And really, I’m not sure how important most of the base is. There are key scenes (the reactor, the armoury, rebooting APOLLO, sublevel 3’s med bay, the climber car) and a couple of nice events. But everything else I handwaved.

So I changed how I ran Act 3. I told the PCs: Fort Nebraska is a war zone. Fires are raging, smoke is everywhere, your radiation alerts keep pinging and you haven’t fully cleaned everything of black silt. Dead bodies, debris and rubble block passages and make movement difficult. Alien creatures are stalking the corridors, hunting survivors...

To move between locations:

• Describe what you are doing to help reach your destination.
• Each PC (not NPCs!) roll Mobility (+ Stress).
• Successes needed:
• Five successes (in total as a team) if you are all moving
• Four if you leave Sgt Iona behind (he has a broken leg)
• Three if you leave Iona and the civilians behind (we have four rescued civilians still with us)

If they succeed, then they move between locations without incident. Otherwise, they met something, or I triggered an event.

I didn’t worry about which precise route they took. Instead, we treated it cinematically: the boring bits happened offscreen.

This change worked well—it introduced some description and interaction, and the players suggested that we could have used that from the start of the game. (Certainly from the start of Act 2, I think.)

Main issues with Destroyer of Worlds

So I have a few issues with Destroyer of Worlds.

Hard to run: My main complaint with Destroyer of Worlds is that it’s extremely hard to run straight from the box. I found the layout extremely GM unfriendly. I’ve mentioned some points above, but it feels like the playtesting could have been more thorough.

The standard ALIEN layout doesn’t help. I’ve mentioned revising the stat blocks above, but even something as simple as using manipulation against an NPC is more complicated because it is an opposed roll, but the stats for that NPC aren’t where you need them. (It would be simpler if NPCs had a target number to beat, but I discussed that in this post.)

As another example, the xenomorph attacks say things like: 

5 LEG SLASH: With a snarl the Chestburster slashes its target’s leg, metallic teeth flashing in the light. Roll for the attack using six Base Dice, Damage 2. If the attack causes damage, it automatically inflicts critical injury #53 (even if the victim is not Broken), triggering an immediate Panic Roll.

I like the random xenomorph attacks, but why make it hard on the poor GM? Injury #53 is a fatal cut leg artery—so why not write … automatically inflicts a fatal leg artery cut (critical injury #53)… and make it easier to run?

It doesn’t have to be like that. RPGs don’t have to be hard to run.

The characters: The pre-gens aren’t great—they’re not as interesting as those in Chariot of the Gods. As a result, my group spent less time bickering amongst themselves (one of my favourite parts of roleplaying). I think that may be the nature of a military-based game (and is one reason why I’m not planning to run the campaign in the Colonial Marines Operations Manual.)

And Zmijewski is horrible.

Combat rules: Combat isn’t why I run and play RPGs. I know it’s a big deal for some, but it’s not for me. I guess I knew what I was getting into with Destroyer of Worlds, but it’s no surprise that I found this challenging.

But having said that, ALIEN’s combat rules are too clunky for running fights with multiple opponents. Against a xenomorph, they’re fine, but I recommend simplifying them.

And overall?

I’m pleased I ran Destroyer of Worlds. I put a lot of preparation into it, but that helped make the scenario mine.

I wish it were more coherent and better written. But the players didn’t notice (except when I had to vent) and as far as I can tell, they had a great time.

I am thinking about creating my own ALIEN adventure, but if I do so, it will be more investigative-y and less fight-y. Closer to Alien than Aliens. But that’s a way off yet.